The stunning new novel from William Boyd, the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of Any Human Heart Vienna. 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Bensimon. He is sitting anxiously in the waiting room when an extraordinary woman enters - Moving from Vienna to London's west end, the battlefields of France and hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a feverish and mesmerising journey into the human psyche, and a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe. This recording is unabridged. Typically abridged audiobooks are not more than 60% of the author's work and as low as 30% with characters and plotlines removed.

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' - it is consistently well written, and very well read by Roger May' INDEPENDENT 'Boyd has probably written more truly classic books than any of his contemporaries' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Boyd is English fiction's master storyteller' INDEPENDENT

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Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor in town seeking psychotherapy, is caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman—until she goes to the police to press charges of rape. Only a frenzied getaway plotted by two mysterious British diplomats saves him from trial. But after Lysander returns to a London on the cusp of war, the traumatic ordeal haunts him at every turn. The men who coordinated his escape recruit him to carry out a brutal murder. His lover shows up at a party, ready to resume their liaison. Suddenly plunged into the dangerous theater of wartime intelligence—a murky world of sex, scandal, and spies—Lysander must unravel a secret that threatens Britain's safety.

Moving from Vienna to London's West End, from the battlefields of France to hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a mesmerizing journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, a plot-twisting thriller, and a literary tour de force.

I can't say anything about the content of the novel, because I stopped reading after a few pages. (I'm pretty sure the story is great, just because all books by William Boyd are). The reason I stopped reading is linked to the unbearable use of punctuation marks. The text doesn't differentiate between a hyphen and a dash as it doesn't leave a space before or after the latter. Therefore, while reading, you permanently loose track off where you are in a sentence and fail to catch the meaning. Sadly, it is not possible to state with Kindl why you chose to return your purchase. I hope this will help improve the quality of this edition and spare other readers the disappointment.

Certain moments in history seem laden with a sense of the loss of innocence, a transition from certainty and security to confusion, bafflement, and loss. It's only an illusion-- the world has always been the vast and inscrutable place it is now-- but the illusion is a powerful one, and allows for great historical fiction in which individual and national coming-of-age are combined, creating something that's both grounded in a particular time and place and insightful about timeless issues and themes. Such a novel is William Boyd's Waiting for Sunrise, in which Europe prior to and during World War I provides the background for one man's journey into the darkness of the unknown and the unknowable.

That man is Lysander Rief, an English actor who in 1913 travels to Vienna in the hope that the new-fangled science of psychoanalysis will help him resolve an embarrassing problem. Even as he makes progress on that front, a chance meeting with one of his analyst's fellow patients begins a sequence of events that creates the potential for much worse problems. Revealing too much more about the plot would spoil the pleasure of its development; suffice it to say that Waiting for Sunrise turns out to be something of an espionage novel, though one that's as much about the psychology of its protagonist and his times as it is about discovering spies and defusing bombs.

As the novel begins Lysander is a typical young man from a comfortable family background: good-natured and with a basic moral sense, but willing to pursue pleasure where he can find it, and largely ignorant of the complexities that can develop from seemingly-simple situations like his trip to Vienna. What happens there will turn him into a wiser but harder man, suspicious of everything but all too aware that his suspicions can't be turned into certainties. Previously unnimaginable things will happen to him, and with a newly-discovered canniness and ruthlessness he'll make them happen to others. His personality and his path in life will be forged and revealed.

This tale of grim self-discovery, of an evolution that's also a descent, is perfectly suited to the 1910s setting, a time when psychoanalysis purported to reveal the lurid secrets behind common problems and the rise of mechanized warfare brought forth violence and devastation on a shocking scale, making the vastness of the world impossible to ignore in a terrible new way. Boyd is not a vivid writer in the sense of making the past feel immediately alive, but he has an eye for aspects of social history that suggest the tone of a given era and align with the themes he's addressing, and his prose is smoothly readable without sacrificing psychological depth or well-chosen detail. Colorful but recognizably human characters like Lysander's explorer uncle and his singer-turned-noblewoman mother add to the richness of the portrait, and their own secrets complement the themes of this postmodern novel of ambiguity.

It might seem that those themes wouldn't allow for a thrilling conclusion to an espionage story, but this one strikes an excellent balance, resolving its major narrative thread in a way that hints at truths Lysander will never uncover, characters who will remain mysterious, gaps in the record with which he'll have to come to terms. Even though the plot features its share of spy cliches, the overall tone of the novel is realistic, a subtle and gradual portrayal of the forces acting on a young man as his future, and that of the society in which he lives, takes shape from decisions that seem casual. Waiting for Sunrise melds multiple genres-- thriller, historical novel, literary meditation on unfathomable existence-- into a seemingly effortless, thoroughly satisfying whole.

Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel by William Boyd is an utterly unique sort of reader-interactive, page turning plot twister, audacious and evocative like no other fiction I have ever read before. I finished reading the book days ago but still I continue to think about this splendidly enthralling novel, turning it over and over again in my mind, asking myself the same questions, trying to work out the puzzles left undone, following loose threads, wondering if the trickster was really unmasked and the mystery truly solved.

The protagonist of the story is an English dandy named Lysander Rief, an ordinary young man whose intelligence, handsomeness and talent for dramatic acting are all three undistinguishing. A man fraught with human frailties, Lysander is a non-extraordinary stage player by vocation, whose destiny will thrust him into extraordinary circumstances requiring him to rise to a role he is reluctant to take on- first as a soldier, then as a spy- to do good for the benefit of his country, to become a real hero of World War I.

Rief's plunge into this unexpected foray of heroism leaves him stranded between two worlds... of reality and imagination, of darkness and light, of black and white, of the edge of night and the break of day-in the shadows, waiting for sunrise.

Part espionage thriller, part World War I military history, part detective mystery, part psychological drama, this riveting, nontraditional novel is also an examination of politics- social, sexual, psychological and emotional. It is a long, twisted journey into the human psyche, acidly observant and intriguingly rich enough to be savored intently and pondered long after the journey is finished.

Lysander Rief is merely a play actor performing on a brightly lit stage and casting just shadows and illusions which look like memories. He is a man looking into a one way mirror and getting a reflection far and deep below; where he was, he is not now...a man with a "past as irrelevant to him as the future. A perfect stasis; the most alluring inertia."

WAITING FOR SUNRISE is about a neutral world, "flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance. It's us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want. In theory."

This is the first William Boyd novel I have experienced and I immediately spotted his singular genius for plotting, pacing, description and evocation.

I delighted in the details of Boyd's characters-the way they looked, the way they smelled, the way they spoke, the clothes they wore, the foods they ate, the beverages they imbibed. I was captivated by the richly atmospheric settings, the descriptive details of buildings, streets, cities and country sides of early 1900s Europe. I loved the allusions to Shakespeare, Freud and Jung. (And the cameo appearance of Sigmund Freud was especially charming as well as intriguing). I thoroughly enjoyed the wide variety of witty repartee and smart dialogue.

William Boyd has a stylistic charisma which draws us into his story arc and keeps us spellbound by a mesmerizing narrative voice which reminds us continuously that; "The world, our world, is for each one of us a unique blend-a union, a fusing- of this individual imagination and reality."

Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel is a hypnotic display of William Boyd's robust brilliance. Playing with imagination and reality, it is a sophisticated and riveting novel- humorous, anecdotal, perceptive, enigmatic and insistent- filled with mysteries which keep whispering to us long after we've put the book down. We will continue to consider the many faces of truth, the many fronts and facades, and keep asking ourselves... was the real Andromeda unveiled? Was the hero's journey a reality? Who belongs to the voice in the introduction and final passages, speaking in second person while it closely watches the protoganist? Could it be the voice of Andromeda? We too, with all our unanswered questions, are left in the darkness waiting for the sunrise.

Once again, William Boyd has written an absolutely terrific novel. The story begins in 1913 in Vienna, where a young English actor, Lysander Reif, is seeking psychoanalysis to cure a sexual problem. Reif encounters a troubled young woman and a member of the British consulate in the analyst's waiting room--both of whom will play important roles in his future. Reif immerses himself in Viennese culture and brushes up on his language skills as he undergoes the talking cure. Soon the troubled young woman, Hettie Bull, will embroil Reif in a torrid affair that ends in tears when he is arrested and charged with raping her. Reif's contact at the British embassy comes to his rescue and assists him in escaping from Austria. Reif's debt to the British government will be paid in full when he is ordered to use his acting and language skills to spy during World War I.

In Waiting for Sunrise, Boyd demonstrates his incredible skills at writing a strong narrative. The plot is intricate without being difficult to follow because of the writer's excellent way with prose. Boyd shows his inventiveness by having Reif be an actor. Who better to cast in the role of a spy than a man who makes a living posing as another person?

In addition to a fast-paced, engrossing narrative, Boyd creates memorable characters and atmosphere. The novel works on many levels. It is a thrilling spy adventure and great historical fiction (Vienna just before the war, the battlefields of France, and the War Office in London). But Boyd takes the reader into deeper philosophical waters as we consider who can be trusted and, indeed, what is real. This is a fabulous book.

This my first acquaintance with the work of William Boyd. I grabbed it from the Amazon Vine program based on the blurb about psychotherapy in Vienna during the time of Freud and the promise of sex, scandal and spies. Psychotherapy provides only a minor role but a recurring theme in the novel. Boyd does deliver a complicated tale of espionage during World War I, although don't expect a James Bond/Ian Fleming style thriller. `Waiting for Sunrise' is more of a Le Carré story featuring amateur spy hunter Lysander Rief.

`Waiting for Sunrise' is the story of two years in the life of Lysander Rief, 1913 through 1915. So much occurs during these years that it feels more like half a lifetime. Lysander lives in England but his saga begins in Vienna at age 27. We accompany him to Italy, the battlefields of France during the Great War to Geneva and back to England. The characters introduced in the first 12 pages of the book form the structure upon which the remainder of the novel evolves.

Reviews mention deception as a theme. The obvious application of deception is that Lysander is an actor whose father was a famous actor. Using his acting skills, Lysander becomes a government agent charged with uncovering a traitor. A more subtle application of deception is the use of lies and ruses to evade consequences by characters lacking the ability to accept responsibility for their actions.

Following this theme is the concept of "Parallelism" espoused by Lysander's psychotherapist. This "therapy" requires Lysander to use "fonction fabulatrice" to deal with problematic events by imagining new realities. In other words, make up new facts to deal with difficult occurrences.

Parallelism enables one to avoid responsibility, guilt or blame. For example, when Lysander was 14, his mother found him lying in the garden of his mother's estate with his pants down to his knees exposing his flaccid penis after having masturbated and fallen asleep. Upset, she said to him, "What happened, darling?" In response, Lysander pulled up his trousers, curled up in a ball and began to cry uncontrollably. He sobbed, "Tommy Bledlow [the gardener's son] did this to me." As a result, both the gardener and his son were dismissed immediately without pay and references and lost their cottage on the estate, despite Tommy's truthful protest of innocence.

The psychotherapist used parallelism to convince Lysander that the actual event was that he had fallen asleep in the garden on a sunny day, woken up late and returned to the mansion to have tea with his mother in the drawing room, with an apology for his tardiness. Similarly, "parallelism" later enables Lysander to avoid responsibility and guilt for causing serious injury and death to and innocent man and boy laying telephone wire when he threw a grenade on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, the psychotherapist, himself, appears to be somewhat of a hoax. In the doctor's waiting room Lysander meets a fellow patient, Hettie, later to become his lover. Hettie is frantic to see the doctor, without an appointment, because he is "treating" her with injections of cocaine and she needs a fix. Further, Hettie, not the doctor, "cures" Lysander's problem of inability to ejaculate. She surreptitiously reads Lysander's file and makes him her "project." By luring him to her studio to pose nude for a sculpture, Hettie performs her therapy on Lysander quite successfully.

Virtually, every character in `Waiting for Sunrise' is able to lie and inflict serious harm to others with little or no consequences. To detail these actions marked by my fifteen bookmarks would certainly spoil the novel, so just be aware.

Personally, I found most of this story so unrealistic and incredible that finishing the book was an effort. This is not to demean the writing ability and literary talent of Boyd. "Waiting for Sunrise" was just not my cup of tea.

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Great spy story, and so much more30. April 2012

Von
Bryan
- Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format: Gebundene Ausgabe

There aren't too many WWI spy novels out there that I'm aware of, and future writers should know that William Boyd has set the bar very high. Not only is Waiting for Sunrise a terrific spy story, but it's a great portrait of life in fashionable circles just before the war. The characters are fully developed and interesting without fail; Lysander Rief is a conflicted, very human hero. Boyd has obviously done copious research on the dress, architecture and language of the period and uses it all to good advantage. Toward the end of the book I was eager to find out what would happen next, while simultaneously lamenting how few pages remained.